Intelsat
804 has to wait

The countdown was stopped three times for reasons such as software
problems and a bad pressure reading in the rocket's third stage.
French Guiana operations director Roger Solari was quoted as saying
the cause of the problem was minor. A new launch attempt will be made
today at 9.16 p.m. local time (Monday, 0016 UTC.)

Intelsat 804 will provide voice, video and data service to the
Indian ocean region. The 3.5 tonne satellite was built in the United
States by Lockheed Martin Telecommunications.

Intelsat
adventure

Pretty adventurous. Intelsat, the International Satellite
Communications Organisation, has chosen Arianespace and the Ariane 5
launch system for three Intelsat IX satellites, continuing their
"pioneering tradition."

Arianespace would of course deny it, but this is the first
important contract for Europe's new launch system, which is
slated to put three Intelsat IX satellites into geostationary
transfer orbit as from 2000. All launches will take place from the
European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

The Intelsat IX series is manufactured by Space Systems/Loral in
Palo-Alto, California. Their average mass at lift-off is 4275 to 4725
kg, too much for most rockets available today. They will be
Intelsat's largest capacity satellites and will carry 44 C-band and
12 Ku-band transponders for multi-purpose telecommunications services
over the Indian and Atlantic ocean regions.

With these three new contracts, Intelsat has now entrusted 21
satellites to the European launch service provider. Arianespace now
has 44 satellites on order to be launched worth about US$3.6 billion.

USELESS FACT: The
number of possible ways of playing the first four moves per side in a
game of chess is 318,979,564,000.

Why this
section is increasingly useless

While Sat-ND as a whole is pretty useless, the "Launches"
section is getting especially useless  simply because
there will probably be satellite launches every day in the future,
which will make the whole stuff absolutely boring.

Of course, Iridium is a good example for that. A Delta II rocket
successfully carried five Iridium satellites into orbit from
Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on December 20. The launch,
Iridium LLC's ninth in eight months, brings the total number of
orbiting Iridium satellites to 46.

The launch took place at 5:16 a.m. PST, within the five-second
window necessary to place the five satellites into proper Low-Earth
orbits. This was the last Delta II launch of 1997, a year in which 10
successful missions carried 34 spacecraft into orbit.

The five satellites are part of Iridium LLC's 66-satellite
wireless telecommunications network designed to offer full global
coverage through a variety of communications services, including
voice, data, fax and paging.

AsiaSat3
goes up on Monday

The company had scheduled the launch of AsiaSat 3 from the
Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 2318 GMT on December 22, it said
in a statement. The satellite has 28 C-band and 16 Ku-band
transponders that cover over 50 countries across Asia, the Middle
East and Australasia.

AsiaSat 3 will be positioned at 105.5°E to replace AsiaSat 1,
which has a technical reach of over 220 million people in the Asia
Pacific region. AsiaSat 3 will take over operations from AsiaSat 1
before it reaches the end of its operational life in 1999.

USELESS FACT: It
snows more in the Grand Canyon than it does in Minneapolis,
Minnesota.

Orbcomm
launch permit revoked (temporarily)

The U.S. Department of Transportation revoked the commercial
launch permit for Orbital Sciences Corp's Pegasus booster but
reinstated the launch license later.

Regulators discovered that the company had redesigned the
launcher's fourth stage, prompting the license suspension.
Reportedly, it was the first time that one of the more than 80 U.S.
commercial launch permits had been revoked.

On Friday, Orbital said in a press release that "The U.S.
Department of Transportation has reinstated our launch license after
all recommended software modifications were made and approved."
It said the company was "now in final preparations for the
launch of eight Orbcomm satellites [sic!] aboard the company's
Pegasus rocket." Once the aircraft and rocket [which will be
launched from the aircraft in flight] arrive at Wallops on Saturday,
and complete the standard final pre-launch tests, Orbital's goal is
to conduct the launch on Monday, December 22, or Tuesday, December
23rd.

Yakutia
renews contract with Russia

News agency Itar-Tass reports that two first stages the very
first Start-1 rocket ever fired from Russia's Far Eastern cosmodrome
Svobodny were discovered this month in the Amur Region, Russian Far
East, and Yakutia (Sakha,) Eastern Siberia.

One could guess from the fact that it took ten months to find the
fragments that they came down over rather remote, unpopulated
regions. Commissions which have meanwhile inspected the sites
confirmed that the fragments of the space rocket did not done any
harm to the environment and landed exactly in set areas.

The findings of the commissions enabled Yakutia and Russia to
renew a contract between the Russian Defence Ministry and the
Yakutian government on the use of part of the republic's territory as
a dump area for burnt-out rocket stages (Sat-ND, 1./3./4.3.97.)

Itar-Tass said that are no obstacles now for the second lift-off
of a Start-1 rocket from Svobodny with the commercial imaging
satellite Early Bird aboard, scheduled for December 24.

The first Start-1 launch from Svobodny sparked off protest among
the Yakutian public, claiming that the launches would pose a threat
to people's health as well as the environment. Russia maintained its
position that the Start-1 rockets were running on solid fuel that is
completely consumed before the empty rocket stages hit the ground.

USELESS FACT: It
is a criminal offence to drive around in a dirty car in Russia.

SATELLITES

Inspector
works fine, says DASA

The failure of the German-built "Inspector" satellite
that was to examine the Russian space station Mir from the outside
(Sat-ND, 17.12.97) has sparked of a bitter dispute between space
experts from both countries.

Nobody has officially raised any criticism, of course, but
nonetheless the Russians have rejected claims by some German
officials that allegedly complained the Mir crew screwed the whole
experiment up. Russian officials said at the same time they weren't
aware of any criticism from the German side.

However, satellite manufacturer Daimler-Benz Aerospace (DASA) did
not agree with announcements from the Russian side that the Inspector
satellite now was nothing but space junk. DASA said on Friday it
established contact with the probe, saying all its systems were
operating. It would circle the globe for at least nine more months
and supply data and pictures (but probably not close-ups of Mir, and
that's what the Inspector was built for.)

USELESS FACT:
Germany holds the title for most independent inventors to apply for
patents.

BUSINESS

Autrey-Loral
out of cash?

The winning consortium in bidding for Mexico's satellite
system, Autrey-Loral, should have paid US$688 million as the second
instalment for Mexico's satellite operator SatMex by December 17 but
hasn't done so.

Infolatina reported that the companies blame "the Asian
crisis," which had made it impossible to issue debt and raise
the cash needed. Autrey-Loral has until December 31 to pay, but
meanwhile must pay interest on the amount. The first third of the sum
had been paid by Autrey-Loral last November (Sat-ND, 19.11.97.)

USELESS FACT:
One-third of black men in the US between 20 and 29 years old were in
prison, on parole or on probation in 1996.

Honey,
I shrunk Hughes Electronics

Raytheon Company announced last January it had
entered into definitive agreements with Hughes Electronics
Corporation to bring about the merger of the Hughes Electronics
defence operations (Hughes Aircraft) and Raytheon (Sat-ND, 16.11.97.)

The deal was overwhelmingly approved recently by shareholders from
Raytheon, Hughes and Hughes' former parent General Motors (the
world's largest car maker, which divested itself of Hughes' defence
operations to better focus on its automotive business.)

Raytheon last Wednesday completed the US$9.5-billion merger in a
complex equity transaction that will transform Raytheon into a more
than US$20-billion company that is the nation's No. 3 defence
contractor after Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which is currently
seeking government approval to merge with Northrop Grumman in an
US$11.6-billion deal.

As a result of the Raytheon merger, Hughes Electronics has now
become a mere telecommunications and satellite broadcasting company
that General Motors intends to retain. Earlier rumours saying that GM
may sell Hughes' satellite business were probably just that: rumours.

USELESS FACT:
Bulls are colour-blind, therefore will usually charge at a matador's
waving cape no matter what colour it is.

DIGITAL

No
sports

Very good news from Denmark: the country's first and only
pay-TV sports channel, TVS, will be shut down at the end of this year
after less than three months of operation!

The channels had been set up by Denmark's public broadcasters in
co-operation with the Danish Football [soccer] Association. Instead
of the expected 200,000 subscribers, just 10,000 were crazy enough to
shell out extra money for pay-TV. As a consequence, pubcaster and
main TVS shareholder TV Danmark refuses to pump any more money into
the channel. So far, Dkr300 million have been invested into the
channel.

Another reason for the sudden death of TVS is probably proposed
legislation that will make major international sports
events with Danish participation available on terrestrial free-to-air
TV without viewers having to pay any additional fee (Sat-ND,
1.11.97.)

USELESS FACT:
Volleyball is the most popular sport played in American nudist camps.

Digital
truths and lies

British Digital Broadcasting (BDB), a 50/50 joint venture
between Granada Group Plc and Carlton Communications Plc, said it had
been granted initial 12-year licences to operate digital terrestrial
television (DTT) services.

BDB chairman Michael Green enthusiastically announced that "For
the first time, people will be able to receive multi-channel TV
through their existing roof-top aerials. No dish, no cable;"
but, may I add, at least a set-top box is needed to convert the
signals.

What is it all about? My favourite news agency made it quite
unclear when they said "Digital TV offers greater channel
choice, improved picture quality and online services such as home
shopping." True and false, of course, bust mostly false:

There will be a greater channel choice, but by no
means a greater content choice. Instead, all that
multi-channel stuff is just about recycling material that's already
available; it's about better exploitation of broadcast rights. It
serves the program providers, not you.

The "improved picture quality" is nothing but a
lie; digital TV will look worse than a strong terrestrial
signal. (At best, you won't notice any difference, especially if you
can't find your glasses.) If your antenna produces a rather weak
analogue signal, chances are that you won't be able to receive any
digital transmissions at all. There is no such thing as a weak
signal in Digital-Land, there is either a sufficiently strong signal
 or no picture at all.

And all that interactive blurb... well, it's all there. Watch
QVC and order some stuff over the phone. It can't get any more
interactive than that unless you want to replace your tele with a
PC.

But never mind the facts, back to business. The ITC made it a
condition that BDB limits agreements with programme providers to a
maximum length of five years. BDB had been planning to enter a
seven-year contract with BSkyB, which incidentally was part of the
BDB consortium but had to leave it following competition concerns
(Sat-ND, 10.7.97.)

The ITC also said that BDB must be allowed to compete with BSkyB
even though BDB investor Granada owns more than 10 percent of the
satellite pay-TV broadcaster.

USELESS FACT:
According to a British law passed in 1845, attempting to commit
suicide was a capital offence. Offenders could be hanged for trying.

HBO
to hit Transylvania

Home Box Office will begin offering a new Romanian-language
premium television service to cable subscribers in Romania in January
1998. Romania represents the second largest cable market in central
and eastern Europe with 2.5 million subscribers.

As part of HBO's initial cable distribution, the service will be
available to 83,000 subscribers in the Transylvania region in
Cluj-Napoca and in Alba-Iulia.

The Romanian pay-TV service will begin offering subscribers 12
hours a day of commercial-free programming, seven days a week. The
schedule will feature films, documentaries, sports and music events,
subtitled in Romanian. [No, they didn't say whether they would air
"Dracula," "Dance of the Vampires" or "The
Rocky Horror Picture Show."]

As with HBO's seven cable channels in Hungary, Poland, the Czech
Republic and Slovakia, HBO's Romanian service will be digitally
uplinked from Budapest and carried on the Israeli satellite AMOS-1.

In September 1991, the launch of HBO in Hungary marked the first
launch of an HBO channel outside of the U.S. In the Czech Republic
and Slovakia, Home Box Office has partnered with United and Philips
Communications BV to produce local-language channels for cable TV,
and since November 1994 has produced a Czech-language movie-based
premium channel.

Home Box Office began offering a new Polish-language premium
service to cable subscribers in Poland -- the largest market in
Central Europe -- in September 1996. In April 1997, Sony Pictures
Entertainment became a partner in the venture.

USELESS FACT:
Laid head to claw, KFC chickens consumed world-wide would stretch
some 440150 kilometres. They would circle the Earth at the equator 11
times or stretch from the Earth approximately 80152 km past the moon.

LAW
& ORDER

Something
must've gone rather wrong

Originally, Telesat Canada wanted to raise leasing
rates for satellite transponders by almost eleven percent in 1998, if
I were to belive a press release of theirs. The Canadian Radio and
Television Commission (CRTC) followed in principal a proposal filed
by the company earlier this year but nonetheless said it had to lower
its rates by 7 percent effective 1 January 1998.

The Commission generally accepted Telesat's forecasts, but made a
few adjustments, revised some of Telesat's forecast expenditures
downward by 2 percent, made certain cost allocation changes, etc. As
a result, the expenditures associated with Telesat's direct broadcast
satellite (DBS) venture were excluded from the rates customers pay
for RF channels.

Following this review, the Commission determined that a 7 percent
rate decrease is in order. This rate decrease will lower the cost of
satellite utilisation for broadcasters and telecommunications service
providers, Telesat said in a press release.

USELESS FACT: In
1977, a 13-year-old boy discovered a tooth growing on his left foot.

Phase
Two

Plans of German media and telecom giants KirchGruppe,
Bertelsmann and Deutsche Telekom to create a German digital TV
monopoly will probably be subject to an even more close scrutiny than
until now.

EU commissioner Karel van Miert said that there were so many
complaints that the proposed strategic alliance (others call it just
a shameless monopoly) would be subject to "Phase Two" of
the proceedings. It means that the deal will be subject to
investigation for four more months, which is only allowed if there is
sufficient doubt whether a deal would seriously harm competition
within the European Union.

Van Miert did not want to comment on reports that German
chancellor Kohl himself had tried to exert pressure on the EU
commission to have it pass the proposed Kirch/Bertelsmann/Telekom
monopoly. Kohl is known to have close ties with Leo Kirch, founder
and owner of KirchGruppe. Without the help of Kohl's so-called
Christian Democrats, Kirch probably would have never become the one
and only German media mogul. However, his new-found partner
Bertelsmann is usually regarded a fellow-traveller of the opposition
Social Democrats.

As reported earlier, Bertelsmann stopped selling Kirch's d-box to
subscribers of its Premiere Digital pay-TV service following
intervention of the EU commission (Sat-ND, 13./14.12.97.)

USELESS FACT:
German Kaiser Wilhelm II had a withered arm and often hid the fact by
posing with his hand resting on a sword, or by holding gloves.

CHANNELS

arte
to introduce dual prime time

Domestic TV channels serving two countries simultaneously are
not only rare, they're also pretty difficult to operate. Take, for
instance, the only such channel I know of: arte, a public cultural
channel serving both France and Germany.

There have been quite a few problems in the past, mainly regarding
the leading personnel of the channel. The latest row, however, was
sparked off by the German side. Viewing habits there differ from
those in France; where prime time starts at 8:45 pm while in Germany
viewers expect the good stuff to start half an hour earlier.

However, viewing habits differ in many other ways, and that
includes the fact that French arte viewers outnumber their German
counterparts by far  not necessarily because the French are so
much more into culture, rather because the channel is available
terrestrially in France while German viewers have got to have either
cable or satellite to receive it.

German pubcasters ARD and ZDF were trying to adjust arte to German
viewing habits; maybe unaware of the fact that arte is all but
popular in Germany, or maybe in attempt to change just that. Anyway,
a compromise has been reached. There will be an 8:15 pm slot as well
as an 8:45 slot. At 8:15 pm, a daily half-hour documentary on
European issues will be aired while the real prime-time programming
will start at 8:45 pm just as before.

USELESS FACT:
Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France called Cue, the name of a
notorious porno mag.

MOST
DISGUSTING STUFF ON TV

This
service is brought to you by Sex-NDTM, a brand new
newsletter published by Q'n'D Productions.

British
sex channel to conquer India?

A hard-core porn channel called "Plus 21" is set
to launch in India next month, offering "tantalising
stripteases" and other [presumably heterosexual]
"attractions," local papers reported.

Suresh Kumar, chief of the Indian company Global Internet Ltd.
which is marketing Plus 21, told a news conference that the
channel would go on air at the end of January. Kumar said the
daily seven-hour telecast, beginning at 11 p.m. (1730 UTC), would
progress from "an X-rating to triple X-rating."

Kumar said London-based company ANC International, which owns
Plus 21, had decided to include programmes featuring "Punjabi,
Tamil and other South Asian porn stars" in the Asian
telecast. "The service will be transmitted across Asia from
Indonesia to Pakistan, from Sri Lanka to China through the
Intelsat and will be carried on major Asian broad band cable
systems," he said. "Indian viewers will no longer have
to put up with bad quality videos."

Kumar denied that the channel would violate India's
broadcasting laws on obscenity. "Regulations governing the
operation of private channels clearly indicate that they are
allowed to telecast adult programmes after 11 p.m." Indian
media laws are however still under development, and even kissing
was taboo in Indian films until recently.

As reported by Dr
Sarmaz in SSSN, 17.11.97, Rupert Murdoch's Hong-Kong based Star
TV faces indecency charges in India just because a court judge
found evidence of "toplessness" (probably of female
actors) in movies titled "Strip To Kill," "Big Bad
Mama," "Dance of the Damned" and "Jigsaw
Murders."

An Indian court last Friday summoned the chief executive
officer of Star TV on the charges. The Delhi High Court asked the
foreign ministry to order Gary Davey, who heads the Hong
Kong-based network, to appear before the court on January 28.

Leaders of all religions in the Lebanon that not too long ago
were engaged in a bitter civil war, be they Christian, Moslem or
Druze all want the programmes stopped. Well, what about some good
clean fun then, such as another civil war so people won't watch
those shocking programmes because they're just too busy killing
each other?

USELESS FACT:
In New Jersey, USA, it's illegal to have sex with the lights on.

Sex
and anti-semitism

The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church launched a
strong attack against "moral decay" on the country's
television.

In rare criticism of state institutions, Patriarch Alexiy II
told Moscow parish priests and lay officials that Russian
television had shown contempt for the church by screening Martin
Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ," a 1988 film
that depicts Jesus as a normal man with sexual desires. [Maybe
the sound track by Peter Gabriel is a bit more interesting than
the film. Anyway, the movie was subject to controversy in Western
countries as well.]

NTV's refusal to give in to church complaints prompted
suggestions from some believers that the screening was a
deliberate insult to the church by NTV head Vladimir Gusinsky,
who is president of the Russian Jewish Congress.

"ORT [majority-owned by the government] is joining the
chorus," complained the patriarch. Other ORT shareholders
include influential Jewish business tycoon Boris Berezovsky.

"The orthodox conscience, still less that of a cleric,
cannot accept legalising pornography, prostitution and the sexual
'education' of schoolchildren," Alexiy said.

Sex
banned on Cambodian cable

Cambodian premier Hun Sen ordered cable television
operators to stop broadcasting sex films, claiming they were
counterproductive to the government's fight against AIDS.

"This is a public order. The Ministry of Information must
tell the owners of the cable TV companies to immediately stop
showing sex films. They encourage people," Hun Sen said in a
speech to Ministry of Health officials. [He did not elaborate on
what they encourage people to do exactly.]

The premier complained that while there was only little
airtime available for broadcasts warning of AIDS, some cable
channels available in Phnom Penh show foreign sex films late at
night for up to six hours.

USELESS FACT:
According to the World Health Organisation, there are
approximately 100 million acts of sexual intercourse each day,
probably quite independent from what's on TV.

RUPERT
WATCH

by Dr
SarmazTM

Perfect
Sky in Japan?

Currently, Mr Murdoch is in Japan once again. So it
probably was not just a coincidence when Japanese financial daily
Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported that Japanese satellite
broadcasting companies PerfecTV Corp and Japan Sky Broadcasting,
partly owned by Mr Murdoch's News Corp, are expected to merge in
February.

The paper said Mr Murdoch and representatives from his
Japanese partners in JSkyB (Sony Corp, national network Fuji
Television Network Inc and publisher Softbank Corp) proposed the
merger at a meeting with PerfecTV officials. Such deal would
create the largest direct satellite broadcasting platform in
Japan.

Its only rival for the time being would be DirecTV Japan,
owned by DirecTV International Inc, a division of Hughes
Electronics Corp. and Japanese video rental chain Culture
Convenience Club Inc. DirecTV Japan was launched on December 1,
albeit with less channels offered than expected.

Sony Corp, also a PerfecTV stake holder, would likely be the
largest investor in the joint PerfecTV/JSkyB venture. PerfecTV is
expected to accept the merger proposal next week and the two
companies hope to reach a basic agreement by the end of January,
the paper said.

PerfecTV has been in operation for a little over a year and
has about 410,000 subscribers, while JSkyB was expected to go
into operation next April.